 Today's session is gonna start off with a quick introduction of what the session is and what the goals are. And then we'll have the panelists introduce themselves. And then we'll get into some questions from the moderators, which is Erin, Yifan and me. And then we'll dive into the slide of questions and as well as in-person questions. So we have a pretty packed for COVID meeting room here. There's about 11 of us. So we might get some in-person questions as well. And then we'll leave a few minutes so that the panelists can add any closing thoughts or comments they wanted to add that they weren't able to get to. And then I also wanna mention that we have, did you mention that we have Valerie with us today and she'll be filling in when there's confusion about and car-specific policies. And so she'll be there to support us in that way. And then next slide please. So for today, we're gonna be talking about how you could find relevant proposal calls for an NSF and NOAA. Those are the two agencies represented here today by our panelists. And we'll talk about how, they'll talk about how we can respond to those proposal calls. And then we'll also be diving into what are the specific requirements for different programs. And then maybe get into the nitty-gritty of how you could possibly navigate multiple funders or partial funding or sending a proposal to multiple calls. And these will really be based on what questions you guys have. So it's not set in stone. It's kind of like we want to make sure that we get to the questions that you have about submitting proposals to different agencies. So we can get started and I'll have Eric introduce himself and maybe talk a little bit about the program that he manages and kind of what he knows, what he can tell us about it. So Eric, if you could start. Okay, I'm gonna talk for what, 10 minutes or something like that? Yeah. Just letting you know when I've gone too far. Okay. I'm Dr. Weaver and I want to thank Danielle and the other organizers of this meeting for giving me a chance to participate in it. I worked at the National Science Foundation and I've been here for about a dozen years now and I've spent the whole time in the Climate and Large Scale Dynamics program. So this is a program that funds research on climate, climate dynamics and also atmospheric circulation and I guess atmospheric circulation including things that are kind of of the size of the synoptic scale to the global scale. So we have another program called Physical and Dynamic Meteorology which funds research of what you would call mesoscale meteorology. So they would be covering things that are smaller than the size of weather fronts and baroclinic eddies, things smaller than I guess the deformation radius if you want to use kind of some fancy terminology. And we also fund research on global warming. I sometimes respond to queries about that from people like Senator Rand Paul. We fund a lot of work on El Nino, on climate variability, the North Atlantic Oscillation, if you've heard of that, Southern Stratospheric Warming, Stratospheric Dynamics is included in the program. And I could list other things as well but I probably couldn't come up with an all inclusive list without blowing a 10 minute limit. As far as kind of things that I would say just to kind of get the ball rolling, I mean, first of all, this is posed as, well, okay, I could say more about myself. I mean, I've got my PhD in atmospheric science. I actually have a PhD in meteorology which is very rare these days. I think the year after I got my degree, the department changed its name to atmospheric and oceanic sciences. And I think a lot of departments did then as well. I mean, partly because meteorology is too much associated with TV meteorology, but also because I think there was a desire to expand the scope of programs and to recognize that there's more commonalities than differences between the atmosphere and the ocean in terms of fluid dynamics. If you really wanna understand the phenomena of the atmosphere, you have to look at the coupled problem. I think we were, a lot of that is motivated by El Nino, for instance, where you really need to understand how the atmosphere talks to the ocean and vice versa. So that was in 1999. I did a postdoc at the University of Washington for a couple of years and then I was on faculty at the University of Wisconsin. Then I was there until 2008 and in 2009, I joined the National Science Foundation. As far as things that I could say, just addressing this particular audience, first of all, this is posed as grant writing to be clear, what I'm gonna talk about is proposal writing. So for us, a grant is a legal instrument. It's a contract that the government makes usually with a university. And so what you're gonna be writing is proposal and that proposal goes for review. And if you're lucky, that proposal results in a grant. Typically, if you're at a university, you're not the one submitting the proposal. The proposal is submitted by an institution rather than an individual. And I would argue that that's for the most part a good thing, right? You're employed by a university and then the university and or, I mean, you could imagine being, you could be employed by NCAR, that institution is going to submit that proposal. You work for them. So they take care of all of the sort of things that you would need as an employee and things like figuring out how your healthcare works and so on and so forth. You write the proposal and then they upload it. That's a good thing because that means that they have expertise in their sponsored research office as to how the process works. And the hope is that they will be able to guide you and provide a lot of useful information to you. If that's not the case at the place where you're at, then we can help you with that. Not every sponsored research offices are not sort of all equivalent. Different universities have different rules. We sort of allow that. And so there's a lot of that that kind of doesn't come directly from the agency but comes from the institution that employs you. As far as the formalities of how to submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation, I don't want to spend a lot of time on that because that's actually the part that's online. There is a proposal and awards policies and procedures guide, which says, these are the sections of the proposal. This is the page limit. This is how long, how much space you have to put your biographical sketch. We call it a biographical sketch. I don't know why we call it that instead of resume or CV. But all that information is online. I'm happy to help you with that. But I think where I could be more helpful is to kind of just share with you a little bit my experience of having read a whole bunch of proposals and talk a little bit about how things work in my program. I do want to point out though that a thing that you need to keep in mind about the National Science Foundation is that different programs are run differently. We're a very heterogeneous organization. And I think that to some extent that's motivated by the fact that we serve very different communities depending on which science we're funding and the expectations of those communities and their needs and so on and so forth are very different. Some of these things I think are also simply historical. So I'll give you one example. And this is I think very relevant because one of the questions that I think comes up is what are the deadlines for submitting proposals? My program, Climate Large Scale Dynamics does not actually have deadlines. You can submit a proposal whenever you want. And that tends to be the norm in the atmosphere section which is my program, Climate Large Scale Dynamics, the physical and dynamic meteorology program which does mesoscale meteorology, microphysics, a lot of things like that. They do lightning, for instance. We have a paleoclimate program. That's different. They actually do have a deadline. There's an atmospheric chemistry program that does not have a deadline. And so that is allowed to have those differences. You have to, the only way to really deal with those differences is to go and look at the website for the individual program. And we can talk about that some more if you like. And the reason, fundamentally, why my program doesn't have deadlines is that when we receive proposals, we send them out for review. We go and ask people, please, please, please, will you review this proposal? And we rely on getting three, four, maybe five people to look at the proposal. They write, we call them written reviews, but of course they're uploaded. We even call them mailing reviews sometimes, but they're actually uploaded through fastlane.nsf.gov as the website. And because we're doing everything that way, we don't have the logistics of convening a panel, which has to convene at a certain date. And so we don't want, if you've got a panel, you've got to put that stack of proposals in front of the panel at a given date. So you necessarily will want to, usually, I guess, not necessarily, you want a deadline for proposals to come in. And so navigating that is something to think about, that the programs have, some programs have deadline, some programs do not. And I think being aware of these heterogeneities and having a conversation about them, I think is quite important. Maybe we can do a little bit of that today. I guess other things to think about, if you work at NSF, at NCAR, you would have to get sort of Valerie about the rules for how NCAR staff can submit proposals to NSF. And I don't know if I want to go into that right now just because I actually don't know how many of you are going to be working at NCAR, but that's a conversation to have. And I guess one of the questions that I saw to pose was how to find opportunities to submit proposals. So what I would recommend is go to the NSF website. You can find programs, you can find the taxonomy of how we fund science. This is a Geoscience Directorate. It has a division for oceans, a division for atmosphere, a division for solid earth. That kind of thing, I think, there's a polar programs as well. That kind of thing you can do from the top down. Another way of doing it, which I might recommend, is go to NSF.gov and you can search for existing awards. In fact, if you go to the advanced search webpage, you can search on keywords. So pick the favorite keywords that Des described, what your research interests are and what you wanna do, and you can easily generate a list of all of the proposals that have that keyword in their abstract or title. And that might be a good starting point because then it made me that the kinds of things you wanna work on are actually funded in different parts of NSF, with slightly different sorts of requirements and research agendas and goals and so on and so forth. So that would be my sort of recommendation. And you could get other information from that kind of web search, which is things like, well, on average, how big is the award size? How many years is the period of performance? Information that's kind of practical, useful information. So that would be kind of, I think my answer to that, to that kind of how to find opportunities question. There's also a question here about deliverables and timelines. I mean, I think it's important to recognize that NSF essentially was set up so that the government could find academic research. And the expectation I think with academic research is that you take the money that you get to do academic research and use it to write papers, to publish, to get research results and publish them in presentment conferences and things like that. So typically the deliverables of an NSF award that we would fund really are supposed to look like your day job as an academic in a certain sense. And so that's publications and I'm emphasizing that. But of course, we also have a mandate to sort of educate the next generation of scientists. So we'd be looking at, are their students going to be funded on this project or their postdocs that are gonna sort of have their early career research experience working on this award. And so that would be something to think about as you plan that, as you think about this proposal that you're gonna write. The timeline business, if your goal was to do research and it's Blue Sky's research where you don't really know the result ahead of time, they tend not to be milestones and deliverables in the way that there would be on a contract or something like that where we're basically paying you to build a widget and you wanna check to make sure that you're making good progress on building the widget. That does happen. I mean, it's something we can talk about but it's not really the norm at least in my program. And as far as timelines, one of the things that to think about there, most of the awards that we make are three-year awards. It's not a rule. You can ask for more years. You can ask for less years too, although it's debatable whether that's the best strategy. So I'm gonna think about with timelines is that, it's not uncommon that people don't finish the research as promised or spend all the money in three years. And it's actually very easy to get an extension for another year. I think we have a lot of flexibility on that. And it's something that to some extent you might wanna take advantage of. For example, if there's a pandemic, you might find that you can't make progress the way you add hope. NSF is able to be pretty accommodating with that. When we give you money, we might give you all that money on day one of the period of performance. You have five years to spend that money. Even if it's a three-year award, we could extend it for another couple of years. You can't keep the money forever. If you sit on it for too long, the Department of Treasury will come in and take it away from you. But that Treasury Department limit generally exceeds the period of performance on the award. So it's something that does come in handy. And I think in terms of specific requirements, you may be aware that NSF has two requirements. One is called intellectual merit and the other one is called broader impacts. I think intellectual merit is reasonably well-defined. You make progress on disciplinary science that you're funded to do. Brighter impacts is a very much more general category. And we can talk about that. I could dig out the rules and read the view that's on a long kind of list. But broader impacts gets at the societal relevance of the work that you're doing. It gets at the educational activity that's gonna be performed out of that. These days, I think there's a lot of emphasis on diversity and inclusion. So things that you do that sort of increase the sort of inclusiveness of the research world, I think are very much of interest to NSF. But I think it's a longer conversation. What exactly do we, what really are the sort of expectations of NSF when it comes to broader impacts? And again, that's the thing where you do find differences from one program to another. And I do again, recommend if you go to the NSF award search and look at some abstracts, you could easily see what people are doing in terms of broader impacts. And it's actually kind of fun to read that stuff because you can get very creative when it comes to activities that you would do under the mandate of broader impacts. So I don't know if I've gone over my 10 minutes, but I kind of think I might be getting pretty close. I'll ask Danielle, is there anything else you'd like to comment on before I give the floor to someone else? I think for now that was really great. And I think you covered a really great overview of the program and NSF in general. So I think we'll hand it over to Ginny for now and have her introduce herself and then we can get into the questions. Thank you, Eric. Thanks, Danielle. I'm Ginny Sells, I'm from the Climate Program Office and I manage a program called the Climate Observations and Monitoring Program which focuses on increasing the use and value of NOAA's observations and other publicly available observations for climate monitoring and climate modeling as well as climate relevant societal applications. So the program is quite broad and it sits in the Earth System Science and Modeling Division in the Climate Program Office. And so also within the Earth System Science and Modeling Division, there are four or so other programs and that includes programs that focus on atmospheric chemistry and climate, the Modeling Analysis Predictions and Projections Program, the Earth Radiation Budget Program, which is new within the last few years authorized by Congress, and the Climate Variability and Predictability Program. So each of those programs have their own focus areas which are kind of described by their names and they're managed by different program managers but I should be able to answer some questions among any of those programs. In addition to the Climate Program Office in NOAA, there are also other program offices like the Weather Program Office which funds primarily the S2S work that you might be interested in. I will not be able to answer questions about the Weather Program Office because that's a separate office from CPO but within CPO, I can probably answer your questions. So each of the programs have competitions that are advertised through a notice of funding opportunity. And so our programs within the Earth System Science and Modeling Division generally follow the same rules because it's all going to be explained in that notice of funding opportunity. And so the proposals will have the same elements, they'll be on the same timeline. One difference is that we retain the possibility to review the applications differently. And so some programs may choose to only use external reviewers and not hold a panel. And so your proposal may be reviewed by three or four external reviewers. Some programs may choose to hold a panel and so your proposal would be reviewed by a panel. And then some programs may choose to do a hybrid and so they can use external reviewers as well as a panel. And in addition for our programs, we have a two-stage review panel. So the first thing your proposal does is it goes through a scientific and technical merit review where it's reviewed for its scientific and technical merit. The budget is reviewed as well as the qualifications of the applicant. Proposals that score above 3.0 and meet a certain threshold move on to a stage two relevance panel. And in that panel, that is a separate set of panelists. That is a panel that is not external reviewers. And those panelists review the proposal for its relevance to NOAA. And that is even more defined and the notice of funding opportunity. And so again, all of this is explained and the notice of funding opportunity. But what goes into relevance to NOAA includes your data management plan as well as your diversity inclusion, diversity and inclusion statement. So that's kind of the review process of the program and how all of the programs follow on the same review process. Let's see. Oh, a little about me. My PhD is in Earth System Science, but I consider myself a polar oceanographer, which I don't focus on anymore, focus more on the many different observations that NOAA has. After my PhD, I jumped straight into a Senior Program Associate with AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and worked more in a consulting role with different domestic and international funding organizations to help them set up topically-based competitions. And eventually felt position was too broad and I missed Earth System Science and fell my way back to NOAA and this position. So what else can I talk? Oh, so I think an important difference between NOAA and NSF is NOAA is a mission-based agency. And so the research questions that NOAA solicits, it's not necessarily blue sky research. It's research that's targeted towards a specific question that's relevant to NOAA's mission. And so if you look at the competition information sheets for each program, they're usually specific to a problem set. And so for COM, we most recently focused on NOAA's Precipitation Prediction Grand Challenge. COM focuses on data set development analysis using observations and working to integrate those observations into modeling or monitoring use cases. Different programs focused on trying to remember. So ERB, AC4, and CDP worked collaboratively to have call on looking at aerosols and satellite applications for aerosol research. MAP held competitions focused on drought and using spear and spear projections. And so the competitions are quite topically targeted and they change each year. And so just because you submit a proposal this year doesn't mean you will be able to submit it to our program in the next year because we might not have a competition that's relevant to that proposal. And so I think that is a big difference between submitting proposals to NOAA versus submitting proposals to NSF. In terms of timelines, our timeline usually stays the same from year to year. So we release a call for proposals which includes the NOFO and many competition information sheets within that NOFO in July-ish. And so this can vary from June to August. It's usually July. We have a 30 day letter of intent period. And so you can submit your letters of intent over this time and then program managers return your letters of intent and program response four weeks after the letters of intent are due. And then proposals are typically due in October or November depending on the year. And then we review those proposals between December and March. And then we try to get program responses back in April. But a lot of the time, our response times depend on congressional and agency-specific appropriations. So we do not get back to applicants until we have our own program budgets. And so I think I've covered timeline, deliverables. Again, the deliverables are specified in the competition information sheet. And like NSF, we do grant automatic one year, no cost extensions. And so they don't even need to be reviewed. You get them automatically. Programs typically fund two to three year projects. In some cases, like if it's a climate process team project, the project making up go on beyond three years. In some cases, longer term projects that might be five year projects are reviewed halfway through to determine your progress and whether you'll receive additional funding for the last two years. I think that's all pretty typical. Are there other things that you wanted me to comment on in my introduction? Ginny, that was great. I think you covered a lot of it. And I think, yeah, your explanations were really clear of all the different programs. And I also wanted to tell everyone that I shared a resource that Ginny shared with us that you can look at that she put together where you can look at the different programs she was talking about and the timelines and other resources that might be useful for you if you're thinking of submitting a grant proposal to Noah. I did want to mention one thing. How do you hear about our funding programs and our funding solicitations? Each program has a website and each program office has a website. And so we have a funding opportunities page that has all of this information posted on it. It's also posted on grants.gov. And we also have a list serve. If you want to join our list serve, we send out two emails and one of two emails a year and one of those emails is about our funding opportunity. And so in addition, so we have these annual funding opportunities in this administration. We've also received pots of money through these one-off legislation packages. And so that includes the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill and supplemental bills that come with the omnibus budget. And so through those, you may see additional competitions that are tied to authorizing congressional language. And so I would say in years where we have an administration that is eager to fund climate research, keep an eye on funding agency websites because you may see competitions come out that are not tied to the annual regular competition topics. Thanks, Junie. Thanks for the additional information about how to access or see all the calls for funding to know us. That was really great. And so we're gonna jump into the slide of questions. We have some like preset questions, but I think you guys have covered those already. So we'll jump into the slide of questions because there's a lot of them and some really good ones. So yeah, do you want me to ask or? I can ask, I think I have a lot of talking. Yeah, I'd share this too. So everyone can see it online without having to toggle back and forth. So I'll just go in order of which ones have the most likes. So the first question is, are there differences in how NSF and NOAA handle review and award proposals, which focus on other geographic regions? For example, Africa and Asia. So Eric or Jenny, do you have a response to that question? I can talk about how NOAA program, NOAA Climate Program Office, NOAA Climate Program Office programs approach this. It varies based on the program and the competition. So I would encourage you to contact the competition manager or the program manager and ask if your focus area is relevant to the call. And so in some competitions like AC4 sometimes funds global focused research as does CBP, but other programs or competitions may not be interested in focusing on specific areas. So I guess my answer to that, we're doing basic science research and so we tend to be focused on the phenomenon. So granted, NOAA actually lives in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific too much except for the small number of islands of course, but a tremendous amount of money is spent on looking at conditions in Eastern Equatorial Pacific because that's where El Nino lives. Lately there's been tremendous interest in the Amazon, the idea that the Amazon is a green ocean. So we receive proposals on that. And to the extent that people can make the case that there is something special going on in the Amazon in terms of the fundamental climate dynamics that the clouds look different there and the circulation patterns in the way that the rainy season unfolds has some dynamical mechanisms that ought to be explored, then we end up funding research on the Amazon. And then other people come and say, gee, you're putting all your money on the Amazon and how come it's not going to the Congo? And the answer is, well, we got a lot of proposals on the Amazon. It wasn't our choice that we prefer one rainforest to another. And lately, we actually did fund a proposal on the Congo where the argument in the proposal was, hey, everybody thinks that the Amazon is the quintessential prototypical rainforest, but actually, if you look at the Congo, things are pretty different there. And if your mental conceptual image of a rainforest is entirely determined by that one place, then you're missing out on a lot of things that can happen in that context. So that I think would give you a flavor of how at least my program kind of considers these things. It's not about, if you say, well, I want to study the Eastern United States, then the question is, well, why? What phenomenon are you looking to address? What scientific questions are you posing? And if the answer is, well, I want to study this place because a lot of people live there. That may not be the winning argument for why the proposal should be funded. But that said, when I say winning argument, what I mean is, we tend to fund proposals because they reviewed well. And when I send out the proposal to review, I'm sending out that proposal to people who have expertise really in climate dynamics by one or another definition. And so it's all about that question of, why do you want to study this region? Why is it of scientific interest? And if you can answer that question, then I think that's fine. Now, I am speaking from my own perspective and from the perspective of my program. So please understand, other things happen at NSF. So for example, we have these solicitations, which are not core programs. They don't exist typically for more than, say, three to five years. But right now we have one that's called coasts and people. And so if you submit a proposal to the coasts and people solicitation, then yeah, I think it's going to be understood that I'm submitting a proposal about a coastal region because it says coasts and people. And so to really understand how, regionality is understood in those solicitations, you would go online and read the solicitation. I mentioned one other thing, which is that when people really want to study a region, when they want to do place-based research, a lot of that comes under the category of, what's that called? Geography, right? So there are geography programs. And for example, a geography program might receive a proposal to look at rainfall in Uganda because it has to do with farming practices in Uganda. And so there was a proposal like that and the CLB program co-funded because that's the thing we can talk about, how things get co-funded at NSF. But they are interested in understanding what goes on in Uganda. They are interested in understanding research which is necessarily regional in a way that you would not if your fundamental sort of program goal was to improve basic science, understanding of climate dynamics. So I hope that answers the question. I mean, maybe I'm off mark, but I'm happy to follow up on that. Yeah, that was really great, Eric and Jenny, very thorough. So thank you for that. The next question, and then maybe after we do this slide of question, we can take questions from the audience in person because I'm sure there's someone there. So the next question is, how are interdisciplinary submissions handled ones that come under the purview of different divisions in NSF or NOAA? Oh, I don't know. Jenny, do you wanna go first on that? No. Okay. I will tell you my experience and here goes. If I get a proposal and this happened, so it's a climate program, climate connects to virtually everything, right? And so I get a proposal and the proposal is, well, we understand how the land surface affects climate in one way or another. So this could be vegetation, for example. So gee, what do I do? Well, I take that proposal and I say, I write emails to everybody I can think of who might be interested in funding vegetation work because we're not a program for biology, right? And because it's a land surface, the land component of the hydrological science lives in a program called hydrological sciences and it's part of the Solid Earth Division within the Geosciences Directory. And so I send an email saying, hey, could you take a look at this and see if you'd be willing to co-review the proposal and co-fund it. And if I'm lucky, then the hydrological sciences program comes back and says, yeah, well, we're very interested in output transpiration, so we want a piece of that. So we'll commit to funding 25, 30, 50% of the cost of this if it reviews well and we will take it to our review panel, right? And then that happens. And so I guess one of the things to be aware of there is that the hydrological sciences program has a deadline and my program does not. And so how long it takes to review that proposal? What's a good time to submit the proposal? Those are questions that now become actually serious questions because there's a deadline, which there wouldn't be if it just came to me. And so if you're working on a topic where you can sort of see how more than one program might be interested in this topic and you don't know where to send it, you have to send an email to the program directors of the programs. You can just send the email to me because then I will probably know who else to send that, who else to ping within NSF, but you can contact the other program directors directly as well. And then if the deadline for proposals in hydrological sciences, making this up, if it's in October, you have to imagine that their panel's not gonna convene until a couple of months after that and they're not gonna make finding decisions until maybe another month after that. And so if the proposal has to go to that panel, then you could submit it to my program earlier than that, but the review process probably isn't gonna conclude until that panel has done its thing. And so there are these kind of timeline issues that come up when you do that. Another conversation, which I think is a longer conversation, is how does this kind of co-review affect the chances of success? And how easy is it for programs within NSF to co-review stuff? And the simple answer that I would give is it sort of depends on how much sort of intellectual distance there is between programs. So we co-review proposals all the time with hydrological sciences. It's not that far away from us intellectually. A program that we co-review and co-fund with a lot more is oceanography, because obviously the ocean is part of climate, right? Physical and dynamic meteorology. There's a weather climate interface. And so we're constantly co-reviewing proposals from one in between those two programs that sit on either side of the weather climate interface. And so that kind of co-review is a lot easier than if you're really going and trying to sort of, bridge an interdisciplinary gap that's much greater in terms of how much intellectual territory we're trying to span. So that's my short answer, but we can have a longer answer if you wanna follow up on that. And I think if you really have ideas, specific ideas about disciplines that you'd like to merge, then yeah, I think we need to talk specifically to those, to which disciplines you're referring to. Summer, do you have a question you wanna ask? Yeah, so I asked that question, and I do have a follow-up on that because we submitted a proposal which went to three different divisions. And we ended up getting 11 reviewers and there were too many opinions and it ended up getting rejected. So I thought that maybe it's a bad idea to have these interdisciplinary proposals in the end because there's just too many opinions and you cannot impress 11 or 12 reviewers. And that's why I asked that question, how do you handle them? Because these are just too many feedback. Yeah, I mean, I guess the problem with your question is that I can only really tell you how I handle them. And I guess, one of the things that I think I've always kind of understood in my own mind is that stuff that I care about is not necessarily stuff that other people care about. So for example, if you're a hydrological, hydrological sciences is very much kind of stream flow watershed type orientation. It's largely done in civil engineering programs. The field I think kind of grew out of questions of, how much rain does it take to cause a flood of a certain magnitude on a creek? Essentially things like will my basement flood kind of questions. And when you look at the kinds of things that people do when they're hydrological sciences, they put on a big tall pair of rubber boots and they weighed in a stream and with a big yardstick and measure stream flow. They do things, and my point is that that's a very small spatial scale compared to climate. Often what we care about is, land atmosphere coupling taking place over rather vast stretches over a chunk of the continental United States. And because we tend to be interested in large scales and they tend to be interested in small scales, a thing that would review reasonably well in my program would not be of tremendous interest to their program. And then the question is, well, what do you do? And my sort of expectation is that, well, if this looks like something that's going to be of interest to the climate dynamics community, I wanna fund it. I don't care if it's not of tremendous interest to the hydrological sciences program because my fundamental question is, is this research going to do something important for climate science? And the thing about vegetation on land surfaces is that I don't really want to be a program about biology but I fully recognize that you can't do climate without considering vegetation. It's one of the things you have to get involved in like it or not. And so the question is, to what extent does a program have the ability to just say, well, I'm gonna fund this because it's of interest to my program, even if it's not of interest to other programs. And I think, the willingness of programs to do that but not just the willingness but really the ability of programs to do that. It depends so much on what else is in their queue. How important is this work perceived in terms of the kinds of science that they're trying to fund? And those are hard questions. I mean, I don't think there's any really easy answer. But yeah, I know what you're saying. You're saying, well, if in every program, my funding chance is one in three, then if I take it to three different programs and my funding chance is one in three to the power of three. And why would anyone bother doing that? And so I agree, that's a hard question. And I think the only consideration is that it doesn't have to be like that. I think the question is, is there a program that would see value in your work even if it wasn't the value to the other players? And that's probably not the best answer in the world. So maybe we could, you could do a follow-up on that if you want. Yeah, go ahead, Jenny. I was just gonna ask you for your input. So go for it. Oh, and I thought it was best that Eric answered this first because I think it's more relevant to NSF. So when NOAA Climate Program Office programs want to solicit interdisciplinary proposals, we design the competition that way to ask more cross-program questions. So COM and CBP held a competition together in 21. COM and AC4 held a competition together in 21. And then COMMAP and the Climate Societal Interactions Division, which focuses more on social science and adaptation science held a competition together. And that panel was, that reviewing those proposals was challenging because you're crossing multiple disciplines kind of beyond the physical sciences. So I think even when you design a competition to be interdisciplinary, review of proposals is difficult. But I would say that it's very, very, very rare for Climate Program Office programs to co-fund proposals unless it's decided on ahead of time. And a lot of that is because of program planning and program budgets and what we have anticipated for programs moving, kind of looking out for the next two or three years. Yeah, if I could just follow on, I mean, what Jenny is saying, there is a flavor of that at NSF, which is that we do have these sort of solicitations. For example, I mentioned coasts and people, it's called coasts and people, you would expect that to be somewhat interdisciplinary. We had one on extreme events that was called pre-events. That was sort of interdisciplinary, I think within the geosciences. So you will find that within the world of kind of, solicitations that are beyond the core programs, there are opportunities for doing interdisciplinary science. But I think, as Jenny points out, those all have some kind of focus to them. So the question is, is one of these kind of solicitations of a particular year going to align with your particular research interests? There was one called food energy water systems, for instance. So they were looking for things that involved economics and energy and also food. So if that happens to align with your research interests and then those become opportunities for you. And so that is a, it's a little bit of a kind of fact-finding exercise to know if there's something like that going on. Awesome, thanks Eric and Jenny for the really thorough response there, it's super helpful. I do wanna take a moment to see if anyone in the room has any questions that weren't asked on Slido. Margaret, yes. So I've been a little bit unclear as to whether NCAR scientists can submit proposals to NSF like for soft money. And maybe just more broadly, you could both address what kinds of institutions are eligible to submit proposals to your agencies. Well, I guess since NSF kind of features in the question, I'll start. And I actually have, Valerie Koch is the right person to sort of answer this, I think, and I'll defer to her. But the basic ideas I understand it is that the atmospheric and geospace sciences division funds, provides the base funding for NCAR. And I would say it's something like 40% of the money in the division goes to NCAR, something like that. So the understanding is that the rest of the money in the division does not go to NCAR, it goes to people in academia largely. I mean, that's not necessarily a rule. Nor is it necessarily a rule that you cannot submit a proposal to the core programs. It's just that that has to be kind of, the core program has to agree to it. So we can have a longer conversation about how that works. But that's specific to the atmospheric and geospace sciences division because we provide the base funding for NCAR. So as I understand it, there really aren't restrictions against NCAR applying to other programs around the foundation. I'm not aware that there's a problem with people that NCAR submitting proposals to the physical oceanography program, for instance. I mean, maybe Valerie can correct me on that. What we see, I think a fair amount of is people at NCAR, researchers at NCAR submitting proposals to various solicitations. For instance, when we did the pre-events solicitation, I believe there were people submitting proposals from NCAR, EarthCube, the cyber infrastructure kinds of calls. I think you often see people at NCAR submitting because NCAR does a lot of cyber infrastructure stuff. There's one in particular, the acronym is CSSI and I can never remember what it stands for. But CSSI funds, various kinds of work involving cyber infrastructure for processing data, for hosting data, for model development kinds of things, that sort of thing. If I remember right, there was a proposal that came from NCAR where they wanted to develop software for dealing with model data that's on irregular grids. Well, how do I take a zonal average if it's on an irregular grid, stuff like that. And so I think if you look at where proposals from people at NCAR are being funded, I think you would find that kind of thing going on. And again, I would guess that if you went and looked at the awards, if you did an award search, you would be able, just there is a way to figure out, give me a list of the proposals at NCAR that NSF is currently funding, the grants that NSF is currently making through these programs. And the Climate Program Office funds NCAR scientists. There's no restriction. Something I did want to mention is that in our Notice of Funding Opportunity, there's the review criteria and the review process. And then at the bottom, there's also this extra section that's called selection factors. And so CPO can select from those factors proposals out of rank order for whatever reason. And so one of those selection factors is partners. And so some competitions may encourage or even require that proposals include a NOAA partner. And so that could be a NOAA lab or a NOAA cooperative institute. They'll typically, the competition information sheet will describe what that actually means in that context. And in addition to kind of, we can fund it in CAR, we can fund, federal scientists can lead proposals, but we cannot fund federal salaries. We can give money to other federal entities, but it has to be spent not on federal salaries. We can also fund foreign institutions. And so right now, COM is funding a collaboration between GFDL and France, an institution in France. And so if you're interested in collaborating internationally and getting your international collaboration money, you can apply to do that through NOAA. Awesome, thanks, Eric and Jenny. Valerie, I know you're going to be talking about this in two weeks, but is there anything you wanted to add from the NCAR side of things? Yeah, and we can definitely get into this further in the October 20th session. So just a couple of things that I'll add on to what Eric said is, within the NSF PAPG, it does state that FFRDCs, which is what NCAR is, it's a federally funded research and development center. Typically they can only submit proposals on an exceptional basis. And so we do tend to reach out to each of the program managers under each of the solicitations to inquire whether or not they would consider funding NCAR on a proposal. Also many of the solicitations that we respond to, they're typically only open to nonprofit organizations and universities. And what I tend to see is that program managers are open to NCAR participating as a sub-awardee on a university-led proposal. So that's generally how we are eligible. And again, there are additional details we can get into later about our cooperative agreement requirements that we have with the National Science Foundation. So hope that answers that question a little bit. Yeah, that was awesome, thank you. I also just wanna make a public service announcement for the Climate Program Office. We heavily discourage sub-awards and sub-contracts submitted to the Climate Program Office. And so we prefer and encourage that PIs submitting for multiple institutions submit identical but separate proposals. And this is outlined in the Notice of Funding Opportunity. And this is not something that we can go back and fix after proposals have been submitted and we've awarded or we wanna make awards and selections. And so if you are submitting to the Climate Program Office, please submit separate but identical proposals instead of including people as sub-awards. Yeah, thanks for clarifying that. We're gonna switch gears a little bit now. I think this is probably a question on everyone's mind is how do you get your first LEED PI proposal funded? And how can we show our qualifications as early careers with relatively less experience? Well, I mean, I, you know, as I sort of see it, you know, oh, Marianna, did you wanna ask something before I? Yeah, I was, it's the same question but maybe a slightly different lens. How did you, Eric or you, Jenny, get your first PI grant proposal funded? So like maybe from the perspective of when you were doing your first grant endeavor, what was it that made it go from you were just co-PIs to now you are a PI on a grant? Well, I mean, I, you know, my impression, you know, which is that I have a pretty normal, you know, unremarkable career through academia. You know, I was a grad student. I wrote a few papers and then I was a postdoc and I wrote a couple more and, you know, I went around and presented my work and got to know some of the people in the field. So I think the expectation is that by the time you submit a proposal, and this was true for me, you already have some kind of track record, you know, that in a way it's not really about the number of proposals you've written or the amount of money that you've got. It's really about, you know, building kind of a reputation, you know, based on publications and presentations that sort of advertise that, hey, you're here and this is what you do. And, you know, I think when I have, I don't remember that there was anything particularly remarkable about me writing a proposal that was work that I'd been doing for a while in Nice and Magic Proposal and I think that people that reviewed the proposal, you know, were aware of it and they also kind of, you know, were able to look at what I'd written the proposal and sort of infer from that that I sort of, you know, on some level knew what I was talking about. And so, you know, if I talk about sort of translating that into what I see every day when we get proposals, because it's common to get proposals in somebody's first proposal, you know, you rely on, typically the proposal is written on the basis of work that you've already done, you know, so I would see people writing and referring to the work that they've already done. We found this in, you know, my paper with so-and-so from last year and here's how we're gonna follow up on that. The other thing that you do is you write, you put figures in the proposal that show preliminary results that you've got. You know, if you really wanna do, let's say, you know, a giant, you know, model intercommarison projects to, you know, look at the effect of, you know, some twiddle of cloud micro physics on climate, you know, it's nice to have some little kind of, you know, pilot that says that, you know, it's likely that you'll find something interesting if you actually go through all of that effort. You know, and so I think those kinds of things you can, you know, you can build credibility on that basis without having a demonstrated track record of funding. You know, there's, when you review proposals for NSF, you know, I don't really like the way we review proposals because it's too complicated. You know, after a comment on broader impacts and intellectual merit and under each of those things, there are five subcategories, so it's 10 things, right? One of the things that you're asked to comment on is is this person, you know, qualified to do the research? You know, almost universally the answer is yes, right? I mean, if the deliverable of an NSF proposal is that you write papers and advance science and, you know, by the time you even start writing proposals, you've already been a grad student in a postdoc, then yeah, there's a paper trail that shows that you can write papers. So, you know, I think the, you know, the question of, well, how do I show qualifications? I think what you're really asking, I mean, the way I would frame that is how do I establish credibility among the people that are gonna review this proposal? You know, and I think by and large in academia, you know, they call it publish or perish. It's not the most friendly way of saying it. But, you know, you do research as a grad student and as a postdoc, you know, on that basis, I think we kind of decide that you can do research as a funded PLI. I hope that answers the question. I mean, I don't mean to sort of, you know, gloss over this because I know it's an important issue. Yeah, thanks, Eric. I would just add that in my experience of sitting on panels, I don't think that qualifications has been the issue for early PIs, early career PIs. I think it's been experience proposal writing and being able to write a clear proposal with objectives that's responsive to the call that the panelists can kind of understand and review. That's within scope. That's not under over budgeted or too ambitious. And so I think it's more about experience writing proposals than it is about their scientific qualifications as a PI. That's an excellent point. Yeah, that's a really great point. You know, if you're, I mean, the thing is that doesn't just apply to the first time you write a proposal. I mean, I see people who are well advanced into their careers and they're still not especially good at it. You know, you see people writing proposals where they've tried to use up every single square millimeter of white space on the page. You just cramming that 15 pages with everything in it. You know, be a little kind to the reviewers. You know, I mean, people have to actually read that and comment intelligently, you know, and synthesize what you've written in a way that I can read it and then make a funding recommendation on it. You know, and I think that that business of being able to write clearly, being able to sort of give the reviewers kind of confidence that yeah, you know, you're comfortable doing this. You know, you've thought about the problem. You have a very kind of, you know, well-developed sense of, you know, what to do next and how to advance the science here. You know, what's the novelty of what you're doing? You know, all of those, I think, comments that in my mind they apply that the talent and skill of writing a proposal really shouldn't be that different from the talent and skill of writing a science paper. I mean, you write a paper, you put it in a journal. What's the guarantee that anyone's going to read it? You know, and you find that, you know, when people are good at writing papers, you know, when they write clearly and they're good at kind of organizing their thoughts, they get more citations. You know, I think that's kind of how, I don't think the rules there are really any different for proposal writing than they are for paper writing. And we at the Climate Program Office are always looking for new faces for panelists. And so if you're interested in reading experience, reading proposals, check out the Climate Program Office programs if you have not submitted a proposal. If there's one that fits your area of expertise, don't be afraid to reach out to the program manager, tell them who you are, tell them what you can do for them. Yeah, you know, there's a question here, I think was a question on the chat about, you know, can you see more than just the abstract in the title of the proposal? The answer for me is no, I'm not actually allowed to, you know, show you somebody else's proposal that they submitted to the program in the certain confidentiality issues here. That said, you know, you could go and ask somebody, you know, for a copy of a proposal I've written, it wouldn't be a stranger, of course, it would likely be, you know, your own thesis advisor, but it could be a colleague that you know well enough to ask for that. And the other way that people see what a proposal looks like is they get one to review, you know, and you can send me an email if you want to review your proposals. We have a stack of them if there are some that sort of meet your particular area of expertise then we could send a proposal to you to review. Fun thing to do if you review proposals is that then go later on to the NSF awards page and see if it got funded, you know. If you thought it was a good proposal and it didn't get funded, then that's kind of interesting. If you thought it was a bad proposal and it got funded anyway, then that's kind of interesting. I mean, those are aims that you can play, you know. And I think all of that, you know, is perhaps helpful in terms of, you know, understanding, you know, what a proposal looks like and what are sort of the standards in the field. Can I add a follow up to this? Do you think it's like, I appreciate that there are good tactics for writing grants like showing preliminary results across all age ranges. There's no early career specific advice. Like don't take on too much right away. Make sure you have a senior mentor, anything like that that people look for. Like just as social scientists, I know there might be not official rules, but there's biases we all have. Right, so you look at someone proposing to do $17 million and there's no one else in their discipline instead of first grant, that's not gonna go over as well. Like maybe it's you get something small and then you do something big. Is there any internal wisdom on that? Well, yeah, it's actually gonna work better if you just bug me and, you know, with different questions because you're thinking of questions that I hadn't thought of. Yeah, absolutely. Your first proposal to NSF should not be to direct a science and technology center for $59 million. When you look at, you know, go to the NSF awards page and you'll see that most of what we fund is these three year projects and basically, you know, it's maybe something like a half a million dollar budget. And I don't think the dollar amount really doesn't matter that much. It's what are you getting for that dollar, right? I mean, typically, you know, on that level, what we're funding is we're funding a professor, you know, maybe an assistant professor if it's early career and that person is getting it one or two months of summer salary and then on top of that, let's say there's a graduate student or a postdoc. So we're thinking about, you know, what's a reasonable amount of science for you to propose that's gonna take you three years and it's gonna involve you and, you know, one or two months of your time which, you know, it's kind of in quotes because I don't know that that's really how these things are done. It's not like you just don't focus on that at all until that one month. And then, you know, there's gonna be this grad student and that's gonna be, you know, kind of an issue because while the grad student doesn't know anything coming in, maybe they don't even know how to write code or whatever sort of, you know, technical thing you need them to do and so that's some effort that's required. Or you could say, well, I need a postdoc because really at this stage, I'm too busy spinning up courses and things like that and I need somebody who's gonna really be able to jump in, you know, hit the ground running, you know, and then you would think, well, okay, you know, how much can I really expect to accomplish, you know, and then is it gonna be something of interest, you know, if I do that much work. So yeah, I think it does, you know, there are bigger projects where, you know, I think we would look for experience. If you wanna direct a big project then we are gonna look and see if you've ever directed a little project. That makes sense. If it's fieldwork, you know, if you wanna go to the field then, you know, have you or have you not ever, I don't know, done the kinds of things people do in the field, you know, flown on an aircraft, you know, minding an instrument or something like that, you know, that kind of stuff will then count. But I don't know if that gets entirely at your question. Yeah, I think it's closer to the early career stage of how to plan that, just hopeful. Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, you know, one of the questions you could ask, I think, and I don't know if there is an answer or a specific answer to this question is, you know, should you be a writer proposal on your own or should you be part of a big group effort? You know, and that involves some considerations. I mean, I think the funding rate in my program for single PI proposals is probably greater than the funding rate for solicitations where they're asking for big proposals that have half a dozen co-PIs on them or something like that. That said, it might take you less time to participate in one of those things because there's a lot of people writing this proposal and it's only 15 pages long. You know, a better question for that kind of thing is, okay, you know, how does that look to your chair, to your department chair or whoever it is gonna decide your tenure case? You know, maybe it looks better in some sense if you've got this single PI proposal because that way you're demonstrating independence and you know, you're building your own sort of reputation and so on and so forth. So that's the thing to think about. You know, so there's a big conversation to be had about sort of group science versus more kind of individual project science. And I wanna add for Eric mentioned field campaigns. So the Climate Program Office does fund field campaigns usually on like a five to seven year time horizon and the planning for those happens over many, many years and usually involves a number of workshops and a series of solicitations. And so for instance, the Climate Variability and Predictability Program just funded pre-field studies for a potential future field campaign in FY22. So those awards should be released in the next few weeks. So as an early career PI that's just started if you're not aware or involved in kind of those multi-year efforts that have been going on, it may be difficult. I'm not discouraging people from applying to future calls but that's something that you would want to contact the program manager about to understand the history of kind of the funding calls that have built up to a potential field campaign, at least for Nova's Climate Program Office. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's kind of a career thing, isn't it? You know, when you look at people who do field campaigns, they tend to sort of make a career out of doing field campaigns and I think that's because it's actually really hard to do that. You know, it's not as if you could just kind of dabble in field campaigning and that's a longer conversation to have. I mean, I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing, you know, that it works out that way. But, you know, on the topic of establishing credibility, you know, if you're gonna propose field work, you know, it's nice if you've done some, I think most people who propose to do field work have done that as a grad student. People who are involved in field campaigning tend to be part of a community of people who are doing that, you know, and so they would know what's going on at the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory, you know, they would know from, you know, AGU sessions and things like that, you know, what kinds of things. Everybody, you should be aware of the Eureka Campaign, you should be aware of the Socrates Field Campaign, you should be aware of, you know, I don't know, within ICE was one, you know, Stradial II was an interesting example. I don't know how many people in the United States are aware of that, but that's a ballooning campaign. You might be aware that the French have a dedicated ballooning division in their version of NASA and they do, you know, stratospheric balloons over the equator that, you know, stay on essentially on orbit for two or three months. I mean, you know, figuring out what's going on in that world is a thing that, you know, the program manager may be able to help you with, but you know, it's a community of people. There are various ways of kind of, you know, gaining an entrance into that world, I think. Great, thank you, Eric and Jenny. That was really helpful. So we're at 1046 and I wanna make sure there's some time for your, for any closing comments that you guys might have, maybe a couple of minutes each and then we can wrap it up. Closing comments. I mean, you don't have to add anything if you feel like you've done that at all. I guess I would sort of, you know, go back to this issue that I mentioned, you know, kind of in the beginning that there's a lot of variation within NSF as to, you know, how programs do what they do. I mean, the business of having or not having deadlines. The business of, you know, there's a review process, right? So we're supposed to sort of make funding decisions and award grants on the basis of kind of how the community perceives what you're doing. But community is kind of a loaded word, right? I mean, you hear about all different things being called a community and I guess it's sort of, you know, I guess in a way I get to decide who that community is because, you know, I'm saying that your proposal is being reviewed by members of the community, but really it's all secret who those reviewers are, right? We're not allowed to reveal their identity because that'd be a really bad thing. And so then the question is, well, you know, if you write a proposal that sort of, you know, you need to propose on climate dynamics, you know, I'm gonna use my knowledge of the climate dynamics community to pick reviewers for that proposal. And I would hope that my understanding of what that community is and who's in it is the same as yours, you know, and I think that by and large works reasonably well. I mean, these things haven't been invented yesterday. You know, but I think the fundamental understanding of, you know, if you're writing a proposal that's going to be reviewed by a particular community of people, what are their expectations? I would hope that you gain some insight into that just by going to AGU meetings and talking to people and, you know, I don't just mean AGU meetings, I mean all kinds of meetings really, that you would be in some sense a part of that community before you even submit a proposal to NSF. But again, that gets complicated if you're wanting to work across disciplines, you know, if you're wanting to do things that, you know, really can't be defined by a discipline in quite so easy a way, you know, and I think that's where, you know, communication with program managers becomes much more important, you know, really kind of doing everything you can to kind of pave the way for your proposal by helping us understand, you know, what this is, you know, how it ought to be reviewed, you know, what, you know, what our expectations should be and making sure that we communicate those expectations to you. So maybe that would be the best sort of NSF specific kind of, you know, parting words that I could give. So again, you know, thank you for kind of, you know, listening to me for the last hour or so. Yeah, thanks so much, Eric. That was, yeah, all your advice and expertise, I think has been super helpful for us to understand kind of how the NSF program works and the funding in there. Ginny, do you have any closing thoughts or comments? I'll stay on this thread of community. So the NOAA Climate Program Office competitions, while they are topic-specific, they're informed by the science community. And one of the ways program managers do that is going to workshops, having these conversations, as well as funding workshops and interacting with CliveR panels and other kind of NOAA specific for us. So I mentioned NOAA's precipitation prediction grand challenge. Our division also has an ESSM council, which is made up of both NOAA and external community folks. And NOAA also has a climate working group, which is part of their science advisory board, which is made up of primarily external people. And so there are lots of ways where we either informally or formally get feedback and input from the science community. And so I would say if that is of interest to you, that's one way to get involved. Actually, could I make one more comment? This is, again, very NSF specific. You can come and work at NSF. I mean, I don't know that that's a whole other conversation, of course, but I'd say roughly half of the people who process proposals and conduct a review process and do things like that are what we call rotators. So the people who don't quite work for the federal government, instead, they come from academia and they sit with us and help us run the programs. And typically they're here for three to two, three, four years, something like that. The reason I say it's a longer conversation is it's not really clear that this is the thing that you wanna do at the very start of your career. But it's something to keep in mind that we do... I'm the only permanent program manager in my program. I can't really run the program myself. It's too big. And so right now, Varlene Pasadvan is in the program. He's from Coastal Carolina University. But before it was Minkai from FSU, before that other people have done this function. But it is something to keep in mind. I mean, you would, of course, learn a lot about proposals and who's doing what across a wide variety of science and would also be a way of understanding what goes on in the government. Great. Cool. Thanks so much, Ginny and Eric. I put Eric's and Ginny's contact information there. I hope that's okay. It was not like, so I figured it would be okay. And we did record this session. So all the participants, and I believe just the early career scientists and post-doctors will get an email about the video. So you can re-watch it if you're out of all of your Netflix shows. And yeah, so our next session is gonna dive more into some of the any car specific policies and protocols that we touched upon today. And Valerie will be there too. So save the day for that. It's in two weeks at the same time. Not sure if it's the same place, but it will definitely be hybrid and you'll get more information on that soon. So yeah, thank you so much. Ginny and Eric again. We really appreciate your time. This is really valuable information for us as we get into grant writing, proposal writing, and yeah, it's kind of an accessible academic career. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. That's great. Yeah, yeah. Okay, bye everyone. See you next time. All right.